👉 In statistics and econometrics, a shrinkage estimator is an estimator that is sensitive to small variations in the data. These estimators are robust to outliers, which makes them suitable for large datasets with many observations. Shrinkage estimators can be defined as:
1.
Robust Estimates
: When there are few observations or when the sample size is very small, it's not possible to use a simple linear estimator such as the least squares method (which does not require any assumptions about the error